"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Ever since Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser told her tale to the Washington Post, I’ve repeatedly seen the word “credible” used to describe her accusation. “It would hurt the legitimacy of the Supreme Court,” said Sarah Quinlan of Red State, “to force a confirmation through when there appears to be a serious and credible accusation without an attempt to investigate the claims.” And even Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie — scarcely the kind of guy I’d expect to join a “we must believe the women” stampede — joined in on the lynch-mob rhetoric: “Following a late-breaking, credible accusation of a sexual assault that allegedly occurred in the early 1980s, when future Judge Kavanaugh was in high school, the outcome of his confirmation proceedings is far from clear.” It behooves us to ask, by what standard is it “credible”?

Or is “credible” now a synonym for suspicious and possibly partisan?

Prior to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s decision to drop this stink-bomb into the Supreme Court confirmation process, there was not the slightest suggestion — not even by Judge Kavanaugh’s fiercest critics — that he was a man of lecherous reputation. While Democrats generally deplored Judge Kavanaugh’s conservative judicial philosophy, and made a lot of noise about the unavailability of his correspondence while he served as an aide to President George W. Bush, no one even hinted that there was any shadow over his personal life. So it would be contrary to his known character for the teenage Kavanaugh to have been “stumbling drunk” at a 1982 house party. as Christine Blasey Ford claims, and still more out of character for him to have sexually assaulted her.

Oh, but it’s a “credible accusation,” we’re told, although I can’t understand what aspect of it makes it “credible.” Was it widely known that Kavanaugh made a habit of heavy drinking while attending Georgetown Prep? Can someone point me to such a report, prior to Thursday, Sept. 13? Maybe I missed something, but I don’t remember reading any such story. Certainly, there was nothing — zero, zilch, nada — to suggest that Brett Kavanaugh has ever been regarded as a sexual predator, until Professor Ford made this accusation.

No, Brett Kavanaugh was a top student, ultimately a cum laude graduate of Yale University, and do we expect straight-A students to be “stumbling drunk” at parties, manhandling every girl within reach?

When the story broke last week, my initial reaction was to think, “Wow, Democrats are really desperate.” And then when Professor Ford told her story to the Post, my reaction was: “So what? Drunk teenage preppies gone wild.” Even if we stipulate, as a hypothetical, that some sort of encounter took place between a “stumbling drunk” 17-year-old Kavanaugh and a 15-year-old Miss Blasey, this was more than 35 years ago, and was probably not the sort of trauma-inducing incident it was portrayed as being. But that was a last-ditch defense — a fallback position — and the fighting on the front-line ramparts had barely just begun.

Judge Kavanaugh has flatly denied the accusation twice and, so far, we do not even have any evidence that young Kavanaugh and young Miss Blasey were ever simultaneously at any such party as she has described. Ed Whelan got himself into a mess this week with some very interesting speculation about how this could have been a case of mistaken identity. Yet while Whelan got spanked hard for that, the Wall Street Journal reported that Professor Ford “can’t recall in whose home the alleged assault took place, how she got there, or how she got home that evening.”

Why is everybody telling us that this is a “credible accusation”? Because, in the #MeToo age, it’s considered sexist to imply that a woman making such an accusation might not be credible. No matter how sketchy the story may be, or how obvious the possible motive to lie, you’re complicit in “rape culture” if you say, “Hey, this looks like a flimsy smear job.”

There’s a 10 p.m. ET deadline for Professor Ford to respond to the offer to testify next week, otherwise Mitch McConnell is prepared to bring the Kavanaugh nomination to a vote.

[…] stop Kavanaugh by any means necessary. Once the unsubstantiated tale by Christine Blasey Ford was pronounced “credible” (because any accusation against Kavanaugh is “credible,” when that word becomes a […]

[…] named as attending the 1982 house party in suburban Maryland where she claimed she was assaulted, the media insisted this was a “credible” accusation, and Democrats declared it was sufficient to bring the confirmation process to a halt. The normal […]